Kansas firm eyes North Country for biochar plant

Published 2:47 pm, Tuesday, December 5, 2017

A Kansas company is looking at Warren County for the site of a plant that would make thermally treated "biochar" from municipal sewage sludge, paper manufacturing waste, and wood and food scraps.

Representatives from Smart Terra Care, based in Independence, Kan., met earlier this month with officials from the Warren-Washington Counties Industrial Development Agency to pitch the $12 million project.

Biochar is a kind of charcoal that can be used instead of chemical fertilizers to enrich soils. It's produced by heating carbon-based waste products by several hundred degrees. If production temperatures are sufficient, the process also can produce gases and liquids that can be used as synthetic fuels.

Bijoy Thomas, vice president of business development for the three-year-old company, said such a facility would the company's first in the nation. He said that while Warren and Washington counties were in the running, "the location is not finalized."

Thomas said the materials used to make biochar would be diverted from current disposal in regional landfills. The process involves dehydrating the organic waste streams, followed by controlled thermal treatment to transform them into the final product.

The company is also exploring what kinds of permits such a project would require.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation has not received any applications for permits related to biochar facility operations, according to a statement from the agency.

Last week, company official John Dowd toured potential sites including the former General Electric PCB processing facility in Fort Edward, according to a report in the Glens Falls Post-Star.

Biochar also locks carbon into the charcoal, which reduces the escape of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that occurs during normal decomposition of the wastes. The company said that biochar can be used to support environmentally sustainable farming while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that an international scientific consensus have identified as the cause of man-made climate change.

Biochar also can be added to animal feed at farms to reduce the need for chemical antibiotics to prevent infectious outbreaks, the company said.